Hey, great news everybody! You remember how San Francisco loaned $7.5 million to catastrophically-mismanaged local venue Yoshi's? (Which is to say, they loaned them $6 million, and then when they burned through that without paying back a dime, they loaned them $1.5 million more.)

Well, the first payment on that loan came due this week, so in an absolutely coincidental and unrelated move, Yoshi's just declared bankruptcy. Oh, but, "We're continuing to operate business as normal," says their PR Director.

Gee, why can't I get someone to "loan" me $7.5 million dollars of the taxpayers' money and then default on it -- while still getting to keep my business?

If that happened, I could probably afford to hire a "PR Director"!

It's like that scene in Office Space: "I don't think I'm gonna go to work any more." "What are you going to do about money and bills?" "I never really liked paying bills, so I don't think I'll do that either."

We have a very full December this year: we only have 3 nights off all month! That's a record for December: typically things are pretty slow between Halloween and New Years. Of course now that we have two venues we should be doubling that, but hey, baby steps.

We got some nice press on a couple of recent shows: Kim Boekbinder and Trash Talk. And they come with photos... well, such as they are.

I brought my camera to the Kim Boekbinder show, and I looked around and saw no less than four people with SLRs frantically shooting every second of the show, so I thought to myself, "Oh good, I can watch the show instead of shooting it!"

Then there's the Trash Talk ones: there were four acts and we get ten photos, and they're 450×300 pixels. I don't know about you, but my four-year-old computer has a 2650×1440 screen. Who thinks it's ok to publish a 450px-wide photo these days? (The photos in the other set aren't much bigger, either.) Here, lemme give you a little schematic of what that looks like on my screen:

Also I love that the SFBG site goes out of its way to make it hard to copy the photos, because heaven forfend someone might "steal" that postage stamp from them. I had to do "Inspect Element" to get the URLs, oh the indignity.

(Update: The first photographer from the Trash Talk show sent me more and larger images, yay! And I just got some from a second photographer, too. So that's great. My criticism of SFBG's postage-stamp site stands, though.)

Fun fact about the Trash Talk folks: any room they are in smells strongly of weed even when nobody is smoking weed. I assume that every piece of gear they own is imbued with it. Seriously there was nothing in the room but road cases and it already reeked up the place.

In other fun news, you may recall our policy of arresting and prosecuting any taggers we catch destroying our property. We've got two cases outstanding currently, and you would simply not believe how slowly the wheels of so-called "justice" turn on this shit. No wonder nobody ever prosecutes these shitbags: nobody is as stubborn as I am!

So this isn't about noted shitbag Kyle Neesan -- we still have no recent updates on his case -- but is about a tagger that we arrested in 2011 by the name of Frank Diamos, age 23. After more than a year, Barry's ritual of weekly calls to the DA's office asking for a status update resulted in this reply:

From: Marc Massarweh, SF Assistant District Attorney

I'm sorry for the delay in responding. I was attempting to track down the officer that deals with graffiti warrants. I do now have more information for you though. It looks like the case was cited as a Misdemeanor, came to our office and was sent to Neighborhood Court. Apparently, as you know, the subject did not appear at his Neighborhood Court. Usually when that happens the case gets forwarded back to the Misdemeanor Charging attorney or down to the head of Misdemeanors to be charged if we are still within the charging timeline. If we are not, the case is forwarded back to the police station from where it originated to have the officers there prepare a warrant to go out and re-cite or arrest the suspect. We have one year from the date of the crime to charge a Misdemeanor case.

Here, I'm not sure where the disconnect occurred, but it appears none of those steps took place in a timely fashion. Whether the case never went back to the Charging Deputy to be charged, or the case never went back to SFPD or SFPD never drew up a warrant, I do not know. It does appear, however, that the case slipped through the cracks, and since the one year timeline has lapsed, our hands are unfortunately tied in regards to this case.

I am very sorry for that piece of news and will discuss the issue with my supervisor to make sure we can prevent this in the future. I know that does not help you in your particular case, however, I offer my apologies and hope that if I can do anything else you will not hesitate to call or email.

Please let me know if you would like to be put in touch with the supervisor of the Neighborhood Court division and I can do so.

Again, I am sorry.

As long as he's sorry, I guess justice has been done, huh?

Let that be a lesson to you, local business owners: the next time you catch someone vandalizing your property, just go Batman on their ass, take them around the corner and beat the living shit out of them. Even if you get arrested, apparently if you choose to just not show up for your court date, the DA won't even notice.

DNA Lounge Cocktail connoisseurs may be surprised to learn that subtlety is on the menu at the South of Market dance club and concert venue. Bartender Jared Williams has carved out a niche for himself, mixing drinks as boldly individualistic as the club's clientele.

To the untrained eye, many of Parker's photos may just look like an unfinished round of Photoshop play by someone with a good sense of humor and a love for mid-90s Internet graphics. However, to any Tumblr fashion enthusiast, they would be immediately identified as decidedly seapunk. Seapunk is both a genre of electronic music as well as a style of dress and graphic design, created entirely online by a small group of social media enthusiasts and music producers. The music incorporates elements of 90s and early 2000s R&B, pop and rap music over generally downtempo electronic beats. The fashion aesthetic is a mashup of a variety of street wear and punk styles, with an emphasis on goth staples reworked with bright colors and tropical themes.

Parker and Adam, along with San Francisco DJ Marco de la Vega, are the curators behind a new monthly event, #Y3K, which merges this digital culture with the nightlife. As their first event description on Facebook stated, they are "merging the URL with the IRL." [...] "I've been doing club photos for about eight years now, and I used to always slap the club logo on them, which people thought was really cool back then," Parker explains. "That isn't cool anymore. Now I'm creating a new way to brand an event that people are really into."

Ok, first of all, slapping giant club logos on photos was never cool.

Anyway, I thought "seapunk" was just making fun of steampunk (that is, goths who painted their New Rocks brown) but now people think it's... a... thing? And it's about like Sorayama dolphins or something, rather than the corsets-and-ukeleles crowd? And that's what they think our Y3K party sounds like?

Y3K started out as kind of witch-housey, but now it's just unsubtly-ironic hiphop to my ears. Apparently I'm out of the loop.

Evidence is mounting that points to a "lost decade" between what we now remember as the 1970s and 1980s, a time whose full cultural trauma and resulting suppression from memory was so complete as to effect itself even on the living. [...]

The space: do we not all feel it? The space. It may be said that the consumer cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, successively exhorting us to embrace artifice and then soul-crushing blandess, were manufactured to "cure" the residual confusion and cultural inconsistency that resulted from the methods used to effect mankind's collective psychic displacement. The hidden "space," however, manifests itself in curious ways -- the obsession with youth and physical condition in those born in the 1960s and 1970s; oddities in climate change data; the apparently freakish pace of economic change in what we believe now to be the 1980s; and so forth. [...] Likewise, no-one familiar with the Lost Decade hypothesis can fail to grasp the religious significance of shutter shades.

The End was pretty crazy -- it was all four rooms, and they filled them. They spent all day (like, six hours) building this Mayan pyramid thing out of plywood on the main stage: it was two levels, so Zion I was rapping at the normal stage level, and his DJ was like 8' above him.

The Above DNA shows have been lightly attended, but it still feels really good up there. It's the right-sized room for the kinds of shows we've been getting so far. We don't really know yet what the maximum comfortable capacity of that room is, because we haven't reached it yet. Funny thing: the last four shows we've had up there had attendance of 74, 78, 74, and 77 respectively. I'm noticing a pattern.

Also we have just booked a last-minute 18+ dance party for this Wednesday, the day after Christmas. This was supposed to be some party up in the Santa Cruz mountains that is going to get rained out, so they moved it here.

That means we will have only been closed two days in all of December! Wow!

So, you know, if you're looking for something to do this week, we've got you covered.

The $20 tickets for Bootie New Years Eve are sold out, and the $30 tickets are going fast! It will go up to $40 soon, and will sell out shortly thereafter.

It's our first New Years Eve Bootie here since 2009, and it's going to be huge. For the last few years, Bootie had taken their NYE party elsewhere because we just weren't big enough for it, but now that we have expanded to four rooms, they're back home! Mashups, live performances, acrobats, three balloon drops, champagne, and Death Guild in the lounge!

To get you in the mood, Bootie have just released their Best of Bootie 2012 CD: 20 30 downloadable tracks for free!

You don't have a whole lot of time left to get your $30 tickets for NYE: it will go up to $40 soon, and it's likely to sell out! Even if it doesn't, you don't want to be spending your midnight standing in line, do you? Advance tickets get you inside before people buying at the door. On a night like this, it makes a big difference.

Are you one of those people waiting until the last minute to see if you get a better offer? You know that results in you standing on the sidewalk in the rain, right? Buy.